And that, IMHO, is part of the problem; people thinking they’re too good to do manual labor and the like, that because they used to have a job where they wore a tie, or because they have a degree, the world owes them something. I have a brother who has been unemployed most of the last decade because he won’t “lower” himself to gas station or retail type work. I understand that mentality, because I fight it in myself. That doesn’t make it any less noxious.
As I said, I doubt that many ad execs are going to mow lawns for a living (though it might do them some good). But I think the job market would affect them at some level.
Depends on how long we allow them to stay on the government dole. IIRC, George Costanza managed to stay unemployed for two or three seasons. I’ve known people who say you’re a chump if you take a job before unemployed runs out.
I think our approach to unemployment welfare is fundamentally flawed; we set it as a percentage of the last job’s salary in perpetuity, reinforcing people’s idea that they are inherently “worth” what their last job paid them, before it stops altogether. A better system, IMHO, would be for it to slowly decline over time, so that people are getting the signal that they need to lower their sights.
Oh, of course not. The illegal is just doing what’s in his best interest, and will continue to do so unless we get quite draconian in our enforcement. The pressure is much more easily brought to bear on employers.
I don’t agree that it’s entirely the nature of the work. I think it’s the pay, as well. If you had a competitive wage, there’d be more competition for those jobs. Now, understand, I realize that business owners have profit pressures. But that doesn’t explain entirely why all these shit jobs pay so badly. They benefit from downward wage pressure. Or at least they survive in part because of downward wage pressure. I keep hearing the market, the market should solve everything. Well, if you can’t survive if you can’t find legal employees to work for you because no one wants your unsafe/unsavory/icky job for the wage you can pay, then the market says you should go out of business. Harsh, but there you go.
And then there are seven-dollar-an-hour jobs and then there are seven-dollar-an-hour jobs. There are folks who will work at Walmart but who wouldn’t clean toilets. There are issues of class and ethnicity at work here, too.
And, again, don’t misunderstand me. We all play a role in this problem. Poor whites who don’t want to be associated with a job that only Mexicans do? Culpable. Business owners who prefer to hire illegal immigrants because they work hard and won’t challenge unsafe/illegal working conditions? Culpable. Middle class whites who won’t support changing how schools are funded because it’s not their schools drowning in poor, Spanish speaking students? Culpable. The American body politic that won’t push through UHC so that the undocumented working a job with no insurance/affordable insurance so has no other choice but to go to the ER for everything? Culpable. The politicians who use immigrants as a wedge issue to win elections and then do nothing? Culpable.
We do that because people’s expenses tend to correlate with their income. Since unemployment benefits aren’t 100% of prior earnings, people on unemployment are generally already scraping by.
A poor economy also makes it harder to make any drastic cuts in fixed spending; you can’t sell your house or car, for example.
Personally, I also think we should change the system, but not as you suggest. Instead, allow people to simultaneously collect unemployment benefits and full-time earnings, as long as they have banked wage credits remaining.
The most direct influence of illegal immigration on my life has been that its existence has encouraged the US government to force LEGAL immigrants to go to often-absurd lengths to prove their legality.
Lots of examples of this have touched my life personally, but here I’ll just mention one: the hoops my wife (a legal immigrant) and I (US-born) had to jump through to prove our marriage wasn’t fraudalent. Given the fact that many marriages ARE fraudalent, this is actually one case where I can understand why the government requires what it does…but if there WEREN’T fraud marraiges for immigration purposes out there, us legit couples wouldn’t have to deal with proving it.
I don’t know if this is aimed at me; I agree with almost everything you’ve said.
Of course. But the point is they need to be prepared to deal with the fact that may not have that same income in their next job, or ever again for that matter. If they’re scraping by on 70% of their last salary, they’re gonna *really *be scraping when unemployment runs out and they’re getting 0%. And unless you’re suggesting we guarantee unemployment insurance forever, that is gonna happen. I think letting them down slowly is a better approach. Heck, I’d even be in favor of letting the initial few months be paid at a higher rate than it is now, if there is a mechanism in place for it to slide down over time.
The minor hit to consumer demand for used cars is insignificant in terms of Joe Blow deciding whether or not he can afford to keep that $400 a month car payment. Ditto for him deciding whether to sell his house or move into a smaller apartment, hold a yard sale, etc. A guy whose welfare income drops a little bit every month is going to be a lot more realistic about what kind of lifestyle he’s going to be able to afford in the future. The current system lets him keep thinking that everything will be fine as soon as he gets a job paying what he made last year. That may not happen, and IMHO we owe it to him to say so.
So I can get fired from my job, get hired at another place a week later, and still draw unemployment on top of that for the next 18 months? And then do the same thing three years down the road? Awesome. I’ll give my boss $1000 to fire me, and then rehire me at the other store he owns. Get someone at the other store to do the same and it’s win/win/win. Free Government money falls from the sky!
Unemployment isn’t free government money. Just so you know.
And I just can’t get past the fact that your argument is essentially that illegal immigrants are robbing everyone of the opportunity for downward mobility. It kinda makes me wanna go thank them, frankly.
Unless, of course, your house is suddenly worth less than your outstanding mortgage balance, a situation in which millions of American homeowners suddenly find themselves.
When unemployment is at 10%, there’s a hell of a lot of us that would be happy to take jobs others may sniff at.
In which case you can still sell it, and owe the difference. Or try renting it out. Or else default. Not pretty options, but being unemployed is not pretty. In any event, a jobless person is well-advised to start thinking about those hard choices sooner rather than waiting until the income drops from 70% to 0%. Again – I’m not necessarily saying that we should pay less unemployment. I’ve no problem paying more in the first few months than we do now; the point is to give a price signal indicating that it won’t last forever, so they may act accordingly.
I used to get part time janitorial work when money was running tight. No way I can do that now because of the illegals. I have several relatives who are furious because they can’t get construction work any more due to illegals, and they were already angry about the way they were being squeezed even before the current economic problems.
My sister-in-law resents the time teachers have to give to students who can’t speak English, because that time is being taken away from her children. When she had to rush her daughter to an emergency room with a fractured arm, the place was filled with Hispanics most of whom presumably were illegal. They had to wait hours. She was spitting nails by the time she got home.
In the last apartment complex I lived in, most of my neighbors were black. Some Hispanic squatters started camping out in the wooded area behind the apartments, and cars and apartments were being broken into. This stopped when the police finally chased out the squatters. Several years later large numbers of Hispanics started moving in, with as many as fifteen people living in two-bedroom apartments. The break-ins started again. On three occassions I watched some ugly confrontations between blacks and Hispanics in the parking lot, with as many as twenty five or thirty people shouting and yelling at each other, sometimes throwing rocks and bottles. The last two times the police were called. This constant tension only ended when the Hispanics were forced out. This was accomplished by several black tenants going to a local minister who had considerable political influence, who got the county and city governments to put a lot of pressure on the landlord to get rid of them. Threatening them with the INS got rid of most of them quickly; in most cases, all he had to do was ask for proof of citizenship and legal residence. Removing doors and windows got rid of some more. That was blatantly illegal, of course, but the aforementioned minister made sure the local authorities looked the other way. Harassment and vandalism by the neighbors got rid of the rest. Both the Hispanics and the blacks wanted very badly to get the few whites in the complex to take their side, and all we wanted was to stay the hell out of it.
Maybe. I tend to doubt it, frankly, but I believe that *you *believe it. Thing is, it’s not the illegal immigrants driving wages down, it’s the laws (or lack thereof, or at least lack of enforcement thereof) that make it not only possible but profitable for companies to hire them. You know what? If we magically were rid of the illegal immigrants, you’d find lettuce picking being done by the children of the poor.
Cesar Chavez strongly opposed illegal immigration and wanted the immigration laws strictly enforced. He hated what illegal immigration did to the wages and working conditions of the people he was trying to organize. I don’t doubt there are farmers who’d love an opportunity to work a 10-year-old to death in a lettuce field for a dollar a day, but God damn it, we already have far more unskilled labor than we need.
Put it this way: In a better economy, I’d have a better job. As it is, I have a temp-to-perm job designed for a kid right out of college. I personally know a coffeshop barista who could and probably would do this job. I also personally know a grocery-store worker who definitely would and could do a barista’s job. In just two steps, among people I know, we’ve moved from my white-collar job down to someone making $9 an hour. I have known, in the past, people who would like to have a $9 job. Those same people, if they could make $8 an hour picking lettuce, would take that (especially if it was tax-free). But instead, lettuce-picking is $40 a day because there are enough illegals willing to make that wage, and they’re SOL.
In good times, it’s not a problem; I move up, and so does everyone else. In bad times, shit rolls downhill and the guy at or near the bottom gets screwed the worst. It’s not economic theory; it’s observed reality.
Of course. This is not about assigning moral culpability; it’s about systemic economic effects. I’ve already said that the pressure is much more easily brought to bear on employers.
Quite unlikely, given that unlike immigration law, the authorities have generally been quite willing to enforce child-labor laws. I think it far more likely that we’d all just get used to paying more for our lettuce.
I’d love it if the people who organize boycotts against Nike for putting factories in Indonesia would start demanding better treatment for migrant workers here. If we can shame shoe factories halfway across the planet into changing legal labor practices, I see no reason not to be just as tough on illegal behavior in our own country.
Look up the stats on tuberculosis, polio, Hep A and B, etc. TB was pretty much gone from the USA. Now we have MDR-TB, brought in predominantly by people from Mexico and the Philippines. And let’s not forget leprosy. Dr. Madeline Cosman on the problem.
And BTW, the correct spelling is “exaggerated”. And the threat is not.
Um. you do realize there are a lot of legal Hispanic folks in America, too, yes? They often are multilingual and brown, and sometimes they have to go to the emergency room for the same reason you do. So there’s really know way of looking at someone and just deciding they were illegal. Should I look next time you take your kids in and think you must be some sort of uninsured hillbilly trash because you, too, are in the ER?
Where I live, there is a Hispanic majority. I would never walk into an ER and be pissed that those dag gum illegals took errr jobs-- er, emergency rooms. No more than I’d look at you and think you were total and complete nasty white trash for taking your kids to an ER. Jesus Christ.
Also, I’m calling horseshit on both of these claims.
I had a friend who spent all four years of college (this was the last four years) working janitorial work at night. She is very much white and had NO PROBLEM get a job doing that type of work once she applied. I had gaggles of friends who did all kinds of unskilled labor for minimum wage all through college, often working in kitchens and cleaning toilets. And, I live in the illegal capital of the USA, California- so you’d think these jobs would be even harder to come by here than elsewhere. I now have countless clients-- all citizens of the USofA, since I do tax work- who work unskilled labor for minimum wage. In fact, the bulk of my clients are these folks.
Secondly, being in California with its large Hispanic population, I know plenty of folks whose families are American citizens with perfectly legal families who don’t speak English much at all and have had to participate in ESL classes. These are AMERICAN CITIZENS, so you’re goddamn right resources should be used for them, as their parents pay taxes just like you and I do.
My own grandfather didn’t speak a lick of English until adulthood even though he and his mother were full fledged American citizens. My mother had a terribly heavy Italian accent until she went through government funded school programs to help her break that habit.
So, seriously, the things you are blaming on the “illegals” are things that often have to do with REGULAR, REAL, AMERICANS. Further, you have no way of correctly assigning blame the way you are. You are looking for a scapegoat and you clearly found it in those brown people you are so bothered by.
Well, to be fair, the question is “How does illegal immigration affect you personally?”, and it affects Lonesome Polecat personally by putting him in contact with brown people whose existence makes him far too impotently enraged to see, let alone make, sense.
Fact is, if the illegals weren’t here, wages wouldn’t be being driven down by them. Any group who is willing to do a job for less drives down wages. That’s simply a fact. And what if these illegals were all gone? Wages would rise to the point that Americans would be willing to do them. Employers would have to pay more. The costs of goods wold rise slightly. And we’d have fewer people on the unemployment lines.